Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition by BharatMalkani(London: Routledge, 2018, 232 pp., $112.00)
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12218 |
| Author | John D. Bessler |
SLAVERY AND THE DEATH PENALTY: A STUDY IN ABOLITION by
BHARAT MALKANI
(London: Routledge, 2018, 232 pp., $112.00)
Bharat Malkani’s Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition is
a welcome addition to the literature on capital punishment. The American
death penalty, the book’s focus, has long been closely associated with
slavery and racial prejudice, but the book does something no other has
so comprehensively: it draws remarkable parallels between – and then
extrapolates valuable lessons to be learned from – the anti-slavery and
anti-death penalty movements. The book addresses a fundamental question
informed by America’s experience with slavery and its abolition: should
modern-day efforts to abolish capital punishment embrace a ‘pragmatic’ or
more ‘radical’ approach (p. 7)? Examining eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
anti-slavery efforts, Malkani analyses whether modern-day abolitionists
should focus their arguments on the death penalty’s ineffectiveness, error-
prone nature, and excessive cost or,instead, attack capital punishment head-on
as simply wrong and immoral because it strips inmates of human dignity.
Malkani’s book opens in dramatic fashion, recounting how Sojourner Truth
– the social reformer who had once been enslaved – spoke passionately at
Michigan’s state capitol in 1881 to beat back an effort to reinstate that state’s
death penalty (p. 1). In 1846, Michigan had become the world’s first English-
speaking jurisdiction to abolish capital punishment for murder, and in her
moving speech Sojourner Truth delivered a rousing anti-gallows message
rooted in her deeply held beliefs: ‘I have come here tonight to see about a thing
that fairly shocked me. It shocked me worse than slavery.’ ‘I’ve heard that
you are going to have hanging again in this state,’ she said in her remarkable
speech, posing the following question and answer: ‘Where is the man or
woman who can sanction a thing as that? We are the makers of murderers if
we do it.’ Malkani’s ground-breaking monograph poses – and then answers – a
different but related question, underscoring the significance of human dignity
and asserting that America’s contemporary anti-death penalty advocacy must
be understood ‘as the continuation of the project that was put in place by
the radical slavery abolitionists, which was to end practices that are not
compatible with the idea of dignity’ (p. 221).
The anti-slavery and anti-death penalty movementsboth began in America’s
founding era (pp. 23–24), with many opponents of slavery – Dr Benjamin
Rush, Benjamin Franklin, and John Quincy Adams, to name but three –
also opposing capital punishment to one degree or another. ‘The first
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© 2020 The Author. Journal of Law and Society © 2020 Cardiff UniversityLaw School
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